Burnout Revenge Online

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Live Revenge, Save and Share and lots of crashing.

By Charles Onyett

EA's lightning-quick racer, Burnout Revenge, is getting polished for release next month, and today we had a chance to check out some of its new features. Two members of the Xbox team, Jon Miller and myself, Charles Onyett, signed into Xbox Live with the sole purpose of beating the hell out of each other. After much trash-talking and threats of kidnapping family members for ransom, we settled down to compete in Race, Road Rage and various Crash challenges.

Those of you who played Burnout Revenge when it came out last September for the last console generation will find little has changed in terms of gameplay. It's still fast, lots of things still explode and you still proceed through the World Tour mode by getting medals and high ratings to boost your ranking. As you might expect, the visuals have been given an upgrade over the previous versions. Cars now have plenty of specific damage and paint scratch detail, more particles fly through the air, the level of detail and texture sharpness have been turned up and the explosions are much more impressive. If you want to access the game's new features, you'll have to head online.

Fran Mirabella's car, but way cooler.

First, let's talk about the new Live Revenge feature. At the start of every race, you'll be able to see which opponents you've previously battled and how many takedowns you are ahead or behind. So, if you raced against a guy before -- let's say his name is IceCreamSux or something -- the game will inform you that since the last race he's still ahead of you by three takedowns. It's not a feature essential to the gameplay in any respect, but it helps build a sense of rivalry between players and makes online play more interesting. This is especially true if you're able to take IceCreamSux down a few times in a match. If you do it enough, the game will inform you that you're even in total takedowns, and then it's your turn to take the upper hand.

Jon and I experienced this to some degree, though we weren't able to build up any sort of significant lead over each other. Through the few races that we did compete in, we were able to see the system in action, and it makes it very obvious which people you should gun for. It was definitely more fun trying to simultaneously run someone off the road to equalize a rivalry and win the race, rather than solely going for the finish line.